~Mazoga~

“Aaaagh!” Mazoga shrieked as another U’Baja host exploded in an unholy cloud of bloody mist. “Where is it? Where the hell is it?!” He stormed around his lab, tossing vials haphazardly on the floor, and pushing the vellum scrolls off tables. The skittering paws of the banthua as they fled down the cavern were barely audible, hidden by the enraged screams of their master.

“How am I supposed to do this without my Big League Chew?!” Mazoga screamed. He had never enjoyed science. He’d only survived college chemistry due to study groups and exorbitant amounts of Big League Chew. Grape, none of that original flavor bullshit. Unfortunately, fate had a twisted sense of humor, and his unique flavor of magic was a science and computer programming hybrid. He needed a pinch right now to help him figure out where his error was. I bet Jimmy has some. He’d have his son bring him some. As his hand reached out for his phone, his mind drifted back to a somewhat lucid state. The vial he had thought was his phone clattered back onto the workstation.

“He isn’t here yet, but he will be,” Mazoga babbled. “All he needs to do is log in to the game.” Long had he toyed with the underpinnings of his current reality. These principles were inviolate, but was anything truly inviolate for a god? Mwahahahahahaha. His mad cackle echoed around the room, or at least the inside of his head.

He remembered the time he had found out he was a god. It was before his ascension, a time that still came to him in fragmented flashes. He longed to return, but they barred him. Before he could shake himself free of it, his mind wandered down the rabbit hole of nostalgia.

A couple thousand years ago in an overpriced musty college dormitory…

“How’d you do it?! I could have sworn that this thing was being possessed by something.” Ted said as he lovingly embraced his desktop. Ted was a 6‘1″ 225lbs lineman. His shoulder-length blonde hair and chiseled jaw screamed “neanderthal bro.”

Mazoga took his glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose. Ted was alright for a jock but sometimes Mazoga doubted that his higher brain function was running at an acceptable level. A person couldn’t know when all those concussions suffered while fondling a ball would catch up with them. They’d known each other for a year now and had even been roommates during their first year of university. Thankfully, Ted lived in a room down the hall with another football player this year. They’d parted on amicable terms, but it might have been a bloodbath if Mazoga had to sit through one more Madden NFL 2006 tournament. Seriously, how could 16 supposed peak examples of human physical evolution spend so much time yelling at their televisions?

“Well, it wasn’t easy,” he lied. “I had to dismantle the tower. Your motherboard was low on fluid, so I topped that up. Pretty standard for the system’s age. The flux generator broke, so I replaced that. I had to repack the bearings on the fan. The worst was your HDD lockout hubs. When was the last time you greased those?!” Mazoga said. He liked to throw a bunch of nonsense at his customers to see just how far he could go with the bullshit. Though he should probably be careful, as this gorilla of a man could absolutely crush him to a pulp. Was he addicted to the rush? Mazoga asked himself.

For a second, Mazoga thought that he’d gone a step too far with the whole flux capacitor bit. He paused and waited, curious about what the oaf would say next. Ted didn’t bat an eye. “I didn’t know I was supposed to,” he said with sincerity in his eyes. The poor sop was clueless about anything within the realm of technology.

“Ted, a desktop computer is like everything else mechanical. They require standard maintenance to extend the life.”

“Is it good to go now? Where you able to get it back to tip-top shape? I really need it.” Ted inquired with a pleading look in his eyes.

Mazoga hid a chuckle. “Yeah Ted, I got it all fixed up for ya. Luckily, I had everything on hand. Though I had to use up the last of my PC fan bearing grease. I even managed to save all your files. You should really back those up on a CD.”

“Oh great! I had a lot of uhhh… homework that I would have had to redo.” Ted said as sweat beaded on his forehead. The reality of the situation must be flirting with his brain cell.

Mazoga knew he didn’t have any homework saved. Though, thanks to Limewire, he had a robust collection of porn that his fellow teammates might find interesting. He assumed that the parody Deep in the Titans wasn’t as family friendly as the original film, and being it was a movie about a bunch of sweaty men in a football locker room, it probably didn’t cater to most of the other jocks. “Glad I could save you from having to redo all your… hard… work,” he said. Toying with his clients was his favorite part.

“Tell you what, let’s get you set up with a monthly maintenance plan. That way, you won’t have to worry about it. I’ll stop by and take care of all the technical maintenance so that you can focus on your… homework,” Mazoga said.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Sounds great! Thanks man!” Ted said, his shoulders lifting as if it had taken a weight off. Many of his clients came from well-off families. They weren’t uber wealthy, but as business executives, they sure made more than his auto mechanic dad and public school teacher mom. This meant that Ted didn’t think twice about buying insurance plans from stores.

As he went through the motion of getting his 52nd “customer” set up for his monthly service plan, he couldn’t hide the somewhat disturbing smile that appeared on his face. His 30 dollars a month veiled extortion plan was going to pay for his education, and the best part was that his customers didn’t even know he was doing it. Unlike the recent New York Mob case where they hyped HealthTech stock prices and made 1.3 million by extorting a millionaire but leaving him alive, he was targeting people with money to spare in amounts minute enough to fly well under their radar, but would set him up for success. He let Ted use his computer to set up automatic payments on his “secure” website, which definitely didn’t not have a keystroke tracker. If he ever needed to grab a ton of cash, he’d have that option, but that was a last ditch plan.

“Alright, I got you on my list,” Ted said with that same smile plastered on his face.

“Listen, I don’t know how you got this all done in one night, but thanks. You are a god!” Ted said as he walked out of the room, cradling his computer as if protecting an infant.

A god? Mazoga thought. A god? He sat back down at his computer and his eyes lit up in a malicious light. If the walls had eyes, they would have seen dozens of people’s computer screens reflected in Mazoga’s eyes. Computer screens of people who had clicked on an innocent-looking link in a cleverly worded email. Computer screens of Mazoga’s future customers.

“I am a god.”

Back in Baherune…

He brought himself back to reality with a shake of his head. The foundation for his plan was ready, the rest would come, and getting lost in his insanity wouldn’t help. As he reset his workstation, he daydreamed about being reconnected with his son. It seemed like he had not seen him forever. He needed more volunteers for his experiments if he was going to continue making progress. He wanted his son to be better off than himself because he was a good parent. Maybe not at god level like him, but maybe a demigod. Yeah, my son will be a demigod in Baherune. He thought. Together we will bring this world to an end, and enter the afterlife together.

A sound reminiscent of a gong bounced off the walls, shattering his daydreams beyond recovery. It was a sound that he hadn’t heard in a literal millennium, a sound that he had been hoping for. It’s time! Mazoga abandoned his workstation and rushed down the dimly lit cavern towards his sanctuary. With a thought, he threw the heavy oak door open. Leaving his pink slippers next to the open door, candles and incense unlit, finches unfed, and seiza bench empty; he ignored it all. His fervently followed routine for entering his sanctuary, forgotten in his singlemindedness.

He made a beeline towards the ornate ebony pedestal in the middle of the room. “Eight, who just arrived and where? Quickly now, who just entered Baherune?” Mazoga demanded as he picked up the black magical sphere, who displayed his numerical name and shook it. As he gazed at the small circular screen on the bottom, a runic symbol appeared, initiating a telepathic communication.

“Nice to see you too, Mr…” Eight began.

“Answer me now!” Mazoga screamed, his voice echoing off the walls, the antithesis between his voice and the otherwise tranquil atmosphere producing a menacing effect that warned Eight to behave. While he didn’t need to speak for Eight to answer, he always did.

“I have not detected a new entry,” Eight said in its slightly robotic voice.

“Then why did I hear a gong!” Said Mazoga. His excitement consumed him. “If there wasn’t a new entry, the alarm wouldn’t have sounded.”

“I have not detected a new entry,” Eight repeated, maintaining his intentionally unemotional voice. Mazoga’s grip tightened in frustration. He had constructed Eight to be virtually indestructible, and while Eight technically didn’t feel physical pain, Mazoga had learned that the sensation of bouncing off a wall was decidedly uncomfortable for the sphere. “BUT… I did sense a HUD activation.” Eight continued in order to avoid a game of chicken with the wall that he would inevitably lose.

Mazoga struggled to reign in his impatience. That was threatening to fuel an episode of rage. “I directly linked HUD activation to player entry. It triggered an alert for both to signal successful integration. One has to come before the other! So again, who just entered and where?”

“HUD activation completed for Thorben Deepiron near Steelmond on the western side of the Langwin Highlands,” Eight said. “No entry notifications have sounded since…”

Mazoga cut off communication with eight and wordlessly placed Eight back onto the pedestal. He rushed over to his bookshelf and shuffled through a couple of tattered old journals, desperately searching for the information he needed. He’d taken to writing things down that were important since his mind was so fragmented. More often than not, he forgot he wrote it and never read them. This time, though, he clapped in success as he read one of his earlier entries. “… since two decades ago,” Mazoga said in a whisper. Mazoga exited his sanctuary, habitually extinguishing the incense that he never lit. Scuttle waited at the door, having learned long ago never to enter the sanctuary unless bidden. “Send the Order to finish what we started,” Mazoga commanded his right hand. He’d sent beasts to do a man’s job last time. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. Repeating past failures and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.

The sound of an animal in pain pushed his mind back into the dance with insanity. “A host. I need another host. Find me something that can withstand the soul pressure of an U’Baja.” While he had hated college chemistry, and pretty much any other science class back on earth, Baherune’s pillars of reality lived square within his favorite science of all. Computer science.